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Book Reviews
by:
Philippa Glanville, Helen Proudfoot
Alaister Laing, Martin Mead, Michael Snodin, et al,
DRAWINGS FOR ARCHITECTURE DESIGN AND ORNAMENT:
THE JAMES A DE ROTHSCHILD BEQUEST AT WADDESDON MANOR (London: The Alice Trust, 2006), 944 pp. Hardcover, 2 vols. 1,100 monochrome drawings in 623 entries, 96 colour plates. ﾣ250. ISBN: 0954781026
FROM FAN leaves to cabriolets, from a waistcoat embroidered with flowers to a tureen, from a buffet-fountain to a wrought iron gate, the designs published in these two handsome volumes document the luxury arts and architecture of the Ancien R￩gime. Art historians, collectors of drawings and prints, those intrigued by the history of collecting, and particularly interior decorators with a historical eye, will appreciate both these rich images and the scholarship, lightly worn, which
is deployed in the more than 600 catalogue entries.
Collected in the 1880s by Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris, a discerning connoisseur with a passion for works on paper (thousands of his engravings form a special category in the Louvre), these little-known designs are all now stored and selected for exhibition from time to time in a newly created Drawings Cabinet at the top of a round tower at Waddesdon Manor. This is the Neo-Renaissance chateau created in the 1870s for another Rothschild, his cousin Baron Ferdinand, on top of a hill in Buckinghamshire, England, to entertain his friends and to house his exceptional collections. Ferdinand shared his cousins passion for the arts of France under Louis XIV, XV and XVI, and a catalogue of his 83 volumes of seventeenth and eighteenth century engravings, many from the same ateliers as Baron Edmonds designs, forms a final section in the second volume.
Elegantly capturing the complementarity of these two exceptional Rothschild collections, Martin Mead, Paris-based architectural historian and a major contributor to the French section of the catalogue, cites a 1775 comment: les desseins sont les manuscripts dun cabinet des estampes (drawings are the manuscripts of a print collection). Works on paper are always vulnerable; the soft washes or watercolour of presentation drawings fade and edges fray. But the proverbial discernment, informed eye and long pockets of both barons guaranteed the quality of these rare survivors, selected for their condition as much as their contents. Some were acquired directly from descendants of the original draughtsmen, notably groups of drawings by Gilles-Paul Cauvet (173188) and Jean-Louis Prieur (c. 173295).
Although most drawings are unsigned, Alistair Laing, Michael Snodin and other contributors have drawn deeply on their scholarship to reattribute many of these works. The catalogue entries are a mine of intriguing insights into obscure corners of European history, opening out context and disinterring complicated stories. When the Infante of Spain married a French princess in Paris in 1739, for instance, the Spanish ambassador commissioned an artificial island below the Louvre, as a dramatic setting for celebratory fireworks and music on the River Seine. J F Blondel drew the scene as it was enjoyed by the Princess from the balcony of the ambassadors hotel; an engaging mix of small boats, emblematic shield-hung trees and dramatic rocks. But when the drawing was issued as an engraving in Spain, the Louvre palace was omitted, as expressing too strongly the message of French power. So this drawing is a unique record of an international court festivity on the river.
France is the major focus of the collection. It was the powerhouse of design in architecture and the decorative arts for the whole of Europe from the mid-seventeenth century, when Jean-Baptiste Colbert as minister of finance initiated the policy of fostering French luxury products in the economic interests of the nation. Many of these designs express the creativity and discipline of well-trained French artists whose role was to supply delicious novelties for the wealthy, attributes such as Lyons silk, gold boxes, silverware or upholstered couches to embellish the arts of living. Great rarities include J A Meissoniers signed drawing, plus his designs for gold boxes, those exquisite expressions of the French rococo style by one of its outstanding exponents.
Drawings for court patrons and for buildings and interiors in Paris and Versailles, the Hague, Savoy and the Vatican, predominate. Around 1820, Jean-D￩mosth￨ne Dugourc (17491825) created dazzling and still colourful designs for post-Napoleonic furnishings at the chateau of Compi￨gne, commissioned when its interiors were being brought up to date. More theatrical, and fully peopled, is a drawing of the temporary staging in Reims Cathedral, devised for the sacre (crowning) of Louis XVI in 1775.
A graphite, ink and wash design for a combined writing desk and toilet table, a typical piece of clever French furniture devised for an anonymous German patron, shows the table closed, depicting its colourful marquetry top. On the left of the sheet, the table is shown fully open, with its mirror, swivelling drawers stacked with cosmetic bottles and secret drawers for writing equipment all exposed. Before photography, being capable of drawing such vivid exploded images was an essential skill in informing and persuading the client to commit his money to a costly special order.
Beyond France, designs commissioned from Simon Gehle for Rococo interiors at two German palaces, Schloss Mirow
(c. 175361) and Neustrelitz in Mecklenburg-Strelitz (c. 1778), are rare survivors, depicting schemes of delicate plasterwork, painting and carving to ornament a princely connoisseurs cabinet. In a handful of English designs, Sir James Thornhills sketches for ceilings showing the classical deities, for an as yet unidentified house, stand out. These were purchased by Baron Edmond as French School, for a mere hundred guineas, in 1882.
Striking and beautiful, these images open up the mysterious world of the workshop, illuminating the process of how artisans recorded the best models, or developed motifs within a fashionable design vocabulary, or presented a concept to a patron. Jean-Baptiste Pillement (17281808), for example, devised many variants on fashionable chinoiseries and his slightly earlier compatriot Gabriel Huquier (16951772), well known for his collection of Eastern decorative arts, is represented by some engaging, vaguely Chinese fire screens, drawn in the late 1730s.
Another delicious expression of the recurrent taste for the exotic is an embroiderers design for a flowering tree of the first decades of the eighteenth century, which is inspired by a South Indian palampore cloth. Gently curving flowers and foliage recur constantly as motifs in the designs for wall paintings, screens and textiles, well into the period of the Neoclassical style.
The drawings described and reproduced in thisthe latest of the exceptional forty-year series of catalogues of decorative and fine art belonging to two branches of the Rothschild family now at Waddesdonform the greatest surviving collection of decorative drawings ever put together by a single individual. They span the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, from Stefano della Bella to the neoclassical Robert Debrets chandelier for LOpera of 1821. A few earlier exceptions include a sketch, which Christopher White attributes, with reservations, to Peter Paul Rubens, and some vases of the time of Francois I.
Waddesdon Manor is a unique expression of le got Rothschild, flourishing and open to the public. Although James de Rothschild, son of Baron Edmond, and ultimate heir to Baron Ferdinand, bequeathed it to the National Trust in 1957, it is run today with style and attention to detail, qualities which, allied to enthusiastic scholarship, underpin these volumes.
PHILIPPA GLANVILLE
Brenda L. Croft (editor) MICHAEL RILEY: SIGHTS UNSEEN
Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2006, 176 pp, $59 ISBN 0 642 54162 0
IT IS GOOD to know that Ron Radford, Director of the National Gallery of Art, Canberra, is pursuing a policy of publishing a definitive monograph to coincide with the showing of an Australian artists work in the Gallery. Well written, informative and generously illustrated, these books can extend and enhance an artists reputation, making them more accessible to a wider public.
Michael Riley was born in Dubbo NSW, to Scottish and Aboriginal parents in 1960. He moved to Moree, then to Sydney and took a course in photography. He directed a number of films and became a frequent exhibitor on the national and international photographic scene. His early black and white portraits include a fine series called Portraits by a Window, 1990, where he depicts his Aboriginal friends and relatives with an eye for their beauty and personal magnetism, instead of the usual negative pictures emphasised by the media. Always he was looking for things other people dont see.
He followed this with the series Flyblown, then with Cloud, 20002005. Some of his images are truly memorable: his views of grass seen at eye level, monuments in cemeteries, a feather floating free, a cow in space, a locust with all its delicate markings. The locust reminds us of a drawing made by midshipman George Raper, an amateur artist who sailed out with the First Fleet, and drew meticulous studies of birds and the strange fauna of a newly discovered continent.
This book is a memorial to a gifted artist and photographer compiled by his colleagues, friends and family. Michael Riley died at the age of 44, an age when many artists have a fruitful career in front of them. It has been carefully and lovingly put together. Brenda Croft writes of his family background at Dubbo and Moree. His paternal grandfather, Alexander Tracker Riley, had told him of his life as a police sergeant, well known at Dubbo, who had solved some notorious murders in his adventurous career. Michael Riley was proud of his people, acknowledging their contribution to Australian life, and determined to tell their story both to them and his white companions.
Out of his fractured cultural experiences and traditions, Riley forged a notable artistic legacy. He recognised the magical in the world around and celebrated it in his photography and films. His film Tracker made in 2002 told the story of his grandfather; other people were involved, but this group effort has become a landmark Australian film. David Gulpilil is outstanding as the Tracker, and the outback scenery is marvellous. The moral issues are unmistakable.
This book, as a tribute to a notable artist, tells Michael Rileys story without sentimentality, truly celebrating his work.
Kenneth Jack DRAWINGSSydney: Beagle Press, 2006, 132 pp. $49.95 ISBN 0 947349 49 9
KENNETH JACKS drawings depict landscapes and his favourite subject, architecture, both in Australia and from his travels abroad. A talented draughtsman, his drawings form the basis of his paintings. The drawings are clear, exact, correct in proportion, mass and perspective, with a spontaneous feeling for weather and light.
His father, a commercial artist for the Victorian Railways, was an important influence on his sons work. During World War II, Kenneth Jack (19242006) was a draughtsman for the RAAF in Australia and New Guinea, and afterwards pursued a teaching career as an artist and print maker. The artists from the past he admired most were Hans Holbein, J M W Turner and the English watercolourists. Of Australians, he favoured Hans Heysen and Lloyd Rees.
The drawings are mostly small in scale and delicate in colour. He loved the early townships, their trees and grasslands, appreciating the contrast with historic European towns and cities with their churches and cathedrals built during the Middle Ages. His point of view is rarely conventional; he would pick a view that complemented the building, binding it into its countryside from which it had grown.
In his introduction to this book, Jack gives us an insight into his drawing techniques using a variety of techniques: pencil, pen line (no tonal areas), pen and wash or crayon, pen and colour pencils, pen and watercolour. After the 1970s he used the new product of oil pastel, with a matt pencil, Staedtlers Mars-Lumograph EB and EE grades, and watercolour. More recently, after sketching outdoors, he tended to do his colour washes in the studio, and experiment with different colour effects. Some of his later drawings are bolder in tone and denser in colour.
Among his most successful works is Waterhole on Wortupa Creek, Flinders Ranges, SA, 1976. Artists often draw the Flinders Ranges, captivated by their colours and shapes. Jacks view, with its delicate colours, his gum trees, rocks, and distant hills is very fine. Also particularly successful are The Olgas NT, 1978; White Gums, Doreen, Victoria, 1979; Steps to Patawarta, Flinders Ranges SA, 1996; Echuca Wharf, Victoria, 1996; his recent views of old Australian townships; and Cyathea Falls, Tarra Valley, Victoria, 2006, among others. He has the careful and endearing habit of naming his drawings precisely and dating them.
There is a good selection of work from his overseas journeys, 56 of the 122 drawings in this book. They include Salzburg, Austria, 1983, Lincoln Cathedral, Lincolnshire, England, 1983, Ponte Vecchio, Florence, 1983, Hong Kong from Kowloon, China, 1983, Castle and Beach, Gorey, Jersey, 1995 and his New Zealand lakes and glaciers executed in 2000, all
fine drawings.
Lou Klepac, in his foreword, writes, With an unerring eye and an obedient hand, Kenneth Jack has produced a body of work which will delight not only us, but future generations.
Marc Etienne JOURNEY TO THE AFTERLIFE: EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES FROM THE LOUVRE Sydney: Art Exhibitions Australia 2006, xvii, 157 pp, over 200 plates, chronology and map. $39.95 ISBN 1875460195
AUSTRALIA HAS a long history of interest in Egyptian antiquities, which started with Sir Charles Nicholson, the Chancellor of Sydney University and Speaker of the NSW Parliament.
Dr Nicholson had arrived in Australia at the age of 25 in 1833. As a graduate of Edinburgh University in medicine, he was highly educated and had developed a strong interest in art and archaeology.
He inherited his uncles interests in trading and ship owning, and held properties on the Nepean and Hawkesbury River. He had the means to pursue his collection of art, as well as engaging in public life and politics, and did so on a scale hitherto unknown in the colony. In the 1850s he went to Egypt, interested in seeing the excavations there. Through his contacts, he was able to secure a shipload of ancient artefacts and send them to Sydney in order to start a museum at the newly formed University. In 1858, he described his collection in a booklet of 64 pages.
Nicholson returned to England in 1864, after 31 years in Australia, but retained a strong affection for his second country, acting as an advocate on her behalf, and was a useful influence in several fields. He added to his museum at Sydney from time to time, items including papers on disk worshippers, funeral hieroglyphs from Memphis, and a copy of the Book of the Dead. In 1891 he published another catalogue of the collection, under the banner of the Royal Colonial Institute, London, with 150 pages and 16 plates.
So it is fortunate that a major exhibition from the Louvre in Paris has come to Canberra, Perth, and Adelaide, which might supplement the more modest Nicholson Museum and other Australian collections of antiquities, and revive interest in the subject. This exhibition holds some seminal artefacts which have intrinsic importance for the study of Egyptology.
In the introduction, the Louvres Egyptian antiquities curator Marc Etienne sets the context for the Egyptian achievement. Their culture was highly religious. Their real world existed side by side with the worlds of the deceased and of the gods. Their living space opened onto passages or doors that led to these other worldsthe Underworld and the dwelling-place of the deceased, culminating in the heavenly Field of Reeds and the realm of the gods. He points out the group of objects which were assembled as a guide to the artistic and intellectual conventions of the time. Their images remind us of the reality of this long distant world.
Some of the exhibits are stunning. The Winged Isis, late period, 525332 BC, a winged bronze goddess central to the funerary rituals that they believed would allow them to continue their existence after death; Re, the sun god with a disk over his head; the marvellous mummy cartonnage; and the funerary chests. These are only some of the 202 exhibits.
There is a useful chronology of ancient Egypt, describing its fortunes during the centuries, its upheavals, wars and expansions, its defeats by the Persians and then the Romans, and a map of ancient Egypt, with its main cities and sites in Lower and Upper Egypt marked.
France has held an important role ever since Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone in 1822, and founded the study of Egyptology. His brilliant work had a great impact on Egypt itself, with the excavation of the major archaeological sites in the country during the nineteenth century, and the amazing discovery of Tutankhamuns untouched tomb in 1922. The collection at the Louvre has a rich assemblage of major bronze objects, bas-reliefs, steles and everyday artefacts, and this selection now coming to Australia is a major event.
Gill Saunders & Rosie Miles
PRINTS NOW London: V & A Publications, 2006, 144 pp. ﾣ30/AUD$85 ISBN 1 85177 480 7
IT IS HARD to understand why the Victoria and Albert Museum, with its legacy of priceless items from the decorative arts, is persuaded to publish such a book as Prints Now, unless it is to point out the decline in standards from the past. The post-modern jargon is all there, hyping up the trivial to assume grand proportions, but the result is predictably disappointing.
It is stated in the introduction: The artists zeal is to stretch convention, and regard print-making as an exciting and constantly changing medium in the visual arts (placing print, alongside sculpture and painting) as a primary means of expression. These are large claims indeed. What are the results? Are the 100 examples of public works of art shown in this book innovative, original, dynamic, and democratic? Despite all the words and references to found objects, cutting-edge experiments, options extended by new mediadigital technologies such as photocopier, fax, inkjet printer and personal computerin the end the results tend merely to distort views, invite repetition and over-decoration, and ultimately, obscurity.
That is not to say that there are not some remarkable prints created using new technology. These include Harold Cohen, 2003, in his computer programmed image, Jennifer Wrights window prints on a digital printer, 2004, Emma Stibbon in her Piranesi-like distortion of scale, 2003, Robert Bains in his Clans and Tartans, 2002, Julian Opie in his repetition of figure-images and his Dreams of Driving, 2004 and 2002, and Paul McDeritts Christmas Cards, 2004. Torres Strait Islanders David Bosun, Billy Missi and Peter Nonbartabart employ local legends and themes to good effect, while Thomas Setshogo, draws Insects in the garden, 1993.
Unfortunately, many aspiring artists are taught to be slaves to the new fashions and new technology. They are taught to despise traditional means of making prints, drawing, etching, lithographs, linocuts and stencils. This can lead to a wilderness of failed dreams and disappointment, many of which will simply disappear.
Paul Hetherington (editor)
THE DIARIES OF DONALD FRIEND, VOLUME 4: THE BALI DIARIES Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006, 70 b/w & colour illustrations, chronology, endnotes, index, 712 pp, AUD$59.95 ISBN 10: 0 642 276447
IT STANDS TO reason, nobody would keep a diary who did not find himself and his life absorbing, writes the author. Born in 1915 at Sydney, schooled at Cranbrook and Sydney Grammar, Donald Friends life spans much of the twentieth century, and he casts an amused eye over his contemporary band of artists, dealers, art critics, gallery directors, curators, and publishers, a veritable whos who of Australian talent. He was a man who dazzled the stage of Australian art for half a century, opinionated and sometimes outrageous, loving a gossip, keeping in touch with his friends and scornful of those he disliked. He produced a large body of art drawings and paintingsand copious amounts of words. Fluent in speech and well-read, he wrote several books, apart from his diaries. He embodied an element of fantasy in his drawings, and an air of excitement in all he did. He was always moving on from place to place, restless and busy, darting about the world.
At one level, his diaries are fascinating, especially if the reader knows the people and places he discusses and the events he refers to, but at another, he comes across as an egocentric, self-centred, obsessive man, boring about his love life, and a little tedious about his fear of old age and dying. A talented illustrator and painter, he was a major member of the Sydney Charm School centred on Merioola in Woollahra during the fifties and in his art demonstrated the widening kaleidoscope of Australian artistic life as it was emerging after the two World Wars, leavened by expatriates from Europe.
Volume four of his diariesthe final volumestarts with his sojourn in Bali in 1966, and the first half is written largely about this place. As a young man he had dreamed of living in some exotic island, like Ceylon, Torres Strait, or at last, Bali. He delighted in Balinese elaboration and incorporated much decoration in his drawing and painting at this stage. He was building a series of guest-houses at Tandjong Sari, mainly in the native style, and was absorbed in the details of construction and embellishment. He was also busy painting fanciful scenes that were mythical with many figures, like his Marvels of the Ocean from his Earth imagined by the Martians. He entered into Balinese culture and life, collecting and recording, and enjoying its celebrations. He wrote several illustrated books while there.
He still made visits from time to time to Europe and Australia, and in the end, decided to return in 1980 to Melbourne, and then back to Sydney, where he died in 1988. In his last years, he started a grand diary and made a delightful frontispiece for it (pictured) but not used on the cover, which has a self-portrait in the style of his other diary covers. It expresses his tongue-in-cheek, self-parodying and irrepressible character.
Donald Friend enlivened many gatherings, observed human foibles and contradictions, and deprecated his own. It might be some time before his influence can be properly assessed. He does however follow some notable satirical artists, Thomas Rowlandson and Hogarth in the eighteenth century, Aubrey Beardsley and S T Gill in Australia in the nineteenth. For all his posturing and impatience, his diaries reflect his interest and fondness for many people, his generosity, his love of jokes and excitement, his appreciation of the natural world, and his place in the artistic world of Australia. He expresses all this in his diaries, with much wit and humour.
Deborah Hart (editor) IMANTS TILLERS: ONE WORLD MANY VISIONS Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2006, 128 pp. AUD$49 ISBN 0642541507
IMANTS TILLERS parents met when they were living in a displaced persons camp at Hamelin, in Germany, after leaving Latvia when the Russians took control from the Germans. They came to Australia in 1949 but retained strong ties with their homeland. Their son Imants, born in Sydney in 1950, was educated in an Australian school while attending a Latvian school on Saturdays. His parents missed their homeland, and they all spoke Latvian at home. The country was much changed, however, when Imants went back to visit in the 1970s.
Imants Tillers, then, was drawn back to his parents homeland. He was concerned to know his origins, but by then he was also responding to a new life in Australia. He has been called a quintessential post-modern artist in his reworking of old images and using quotations in his art. His imagination is strangely literary. As he once said, I cannot breathedo not leave me, Europe. He is concerned not to dismiss his European legacy, but to link the past with the present. In this book it is possible to map out some of his journeys.
In trying to bridge the gap between the two cultures, he has employed an amalgam from different sources, from Giorgio de Chirico to Marcel Duchamp and nineteenth-century German Romanticism. He also uses chance encounters to deflect his path, to challenge fixed boundaries in his canvas board system. He has devised a method where he uses these boards in parcels from three to three hundred, assembling them like jigsaw puzzles.
Since the 1970s he has created an impressive number of major works, some of which he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1986, when he was selected to represent Australia. The hyberborean and the speluncar, 1986, was one, and the Heart of the wood, 1985 another, drawn from Anselm Kiefers Germanys spiritual heroes of 1973.
Tillers sources may be both European and Australian. In Mount Analogue, 1985, he bases his work on Eug￨ne von Gu￩rards Mount Kosciusko, 1863, while his Hiatus, 1987 is derived from von Gu￩rards Milford Sound and Colin McCahons Victory over death, 1970. Again his Kangaroo Blank, 1988, owes its source to George Stubbs Portrait of a Kongouro from New Holland, c. 1771, painted from a skin sent back on Cooks voyage of exploration.
In 1992 he embarked on a large painting called Diaspora, inspired by the events leading to Latvias independence from Russian domination. This word was applied after World War II to describe the vast movement of people displaced from one country to another and their sense of the lost world they had left behind, a world partly reclaimed by Latvian independence. The painting called Izkliede was in a similar vein, followed in 1994 by Paradiso, where he tried to convey the feeling of loss, fragmentation and survival. A Farewell to Reason followed in 1996. These works are regarded as a particular cycle, looking back, but providing links with what was to follow.
Nature speaks, 1998, was a result of Tillers move with his family from Sydney to Cooma, in the Monaro high country close to Canberra. Four separate but linked installations were grouped around the word horizon, each of sixteen large canvas boards. Tillers and his wife became taken with the special character of the Monaro region, the basalt and granite rocks, the vast distances, the volcanic outcrops still visible on the surfacea hard country but intriguing. In his work Monaro, 1998, he embodies childlike faces with other symbols he uses again, culminating with The View from K, 199798. In this view he draws on Caspar David Friedrichs Wanderer above the mists, 1819. In another group of canvas boards in the series, he depicts Ayers Rock in its desert landscape.
When experienced in the enclosed walls of an art gallery, Imants Tillers works seem to some viewers confronting, even claustrophobic. Their size and complicated European references make them difficult to read and understand. This book, therefore, with the installations reduced to a much more viewable scale, accompanied by comments from the artist and his curators, makes his art appear much clearer and more accessible.
Susan Hunt & Graeme Davison
SYDNEY VIEWS 1788-1888,
FROM THE BEAT KNOBLAUCH COLLECTION
Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 2007. Exhibition Catalogue, Museum of Sydney, 144 pp, 100 colour plates $49.95 ISBN 9781 87699 1255
THE PERENNIAL fascination with the art of the first British settlers on the Australian continent stays with us, yet then, more than 200 years ago, everything seemed new and strangethe plants, the birds and animals, and the Aborigines. The drawings and paintings have a special appeal to us, reminding us of the wonder and hardships of it all.
Many of these images were then transferred to lithographs and printed in the various accounts written by the officials at the time and published in England. Within twenty years, a printing press was set up in Sydney, to print the regulations for the convicts and townspeople and later to print the newspaper for the colony.
This year, there is a bounty of riches published in three books issued, two by the Historic Houses Trust, and the third by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra: Joseph Lycett, Sydney Views, and Printed Images of the colony to 1901. This book of Sydney Views, from the Beat Knoblauch Collection, assembled by Susan Hunt of the Trust with an essay by Graeme Davison on the panoramas, has many images not published before, and so can extend our knowledge of the subject. The main body of prints dates from 1788 to 1830, with some made after 1850 and the birds-eye prints from the newspapers in the 1880s.
The first view is of Botany Bay, adjacent to Sydney Harbour, but disappointing to the newcomers with its sandy soil and lack of shelter from attack. Governor Phillip investigated the harbour to the north, Port Jackson, and found Sydney Cove more suitable for settlement. This view is particularly interesting, taken from a description from an unknown artist, made by Robert Cleveley in London, and engraved by Thomas Medland. It is followed by two views also by an unknown artist and published by John Stockdale in London. Then we find more familiar views after Thomas Waiting by Edward Dayes, engraved by James Heath. Six slightly nave pictures published in George Barringtons Account, 1803, are charming but somehow inaccurate. Some of these might be of the settlement of Sydney, Norfolk Island, strangely named by Lieutenant King when he took a large party of convicts there when the main colony at Sydney on the mainland faced the prospect of starving. These small prints are in pristine condition, a special feature of the collection.
The arrangement of the views in the catalogue is puzzling. They are not presented chronologically, but rather by overlapping categories, so there is some confusion as they tend to jump about. The twelve French views are broken up, and they are among the most finished and elegant of the collection. Some are rarely seen in colour: numbers 17, 22, 26, 36, 46, 51, 53, 57, 58, 60, 62, 86, and 89, thirteen views in all. And there are, surprisingly, two German views.
John Carmichael the engraver is given his due, as is Augustus Earle, in his panorama exhibited in 1829 in London, and his lithographed view of North Head, both rarely seen, as well as his Government House. Major Taylors panorama was engraved in Paris c. 1824, as well as in London. One of the first views of the town of Sydney, attributed to Thomas Watling, and engraved by W S Blake in 1802, can be seen clearly, dedicated to Captain John Hunter.
There are many interesting views, apart from the better known ones,
to intrigue the scholar of the first town which blossomed into the large city of Sydney of today. The exhibition is at the Museum of Sydney, on the comer of Bridge and Phillip Streets, until April 2008. The collector, Beat Knoblauch, has exercised a rare discrimination in his choice of prints to make an exhibition of special interest, including some by Richard Read, John Eyre, James Wallis, John Skinner Prout, Robert Westmacott,
S T Gill, Frederick Garling, Frederick Terry, Conrad Martens, and the others not yet known, who drew the birds-eye panoramas. The catalogue is a boon for serious students. |
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